U.S. Senate panel debates how to protect children on social media platforms
WASHINGTON — U.S. senators at a Tuesday hearing pushed for bipartisan legislation to protect children online. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law heard testimony from whistleblower Arturo Bejar, who served as Facebook’s director of engineering for protect and care from 2009 to 2015. Committee members discussed paths forward for holding […]
What would the world lose with the demise of Twitter?
By Anjana Susarla, Michigan State University What do a cybersecurity researcher building a system to generate alerts for detecting security threats and vulnerabilities, a wildfire watcher who tracks the spread of forest fires, and public health professionals trying to predict enrollment in health insurance exchanges have in common? They all rely on analyzing data from […]
Committee passes bill to block social media from ‘censoring’ users
An Ohio House committee passed legislation Tuesday prohibiting social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from “censoring” their users. The legislation would block the companies from removing posts or expelling people from their platforms based on the “viewpoint” of users or ideas expressed in their posts. It wouldn’t apply to speech already illegal under […]
Elon Musk and oligarchs of the ‘Second Gilded Age’ can both sway public, exploit their data
By Nolan Higdon, California State University, East Bay During the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, and the early decades of the 20th century, U.S. captains of industry such as William Randolph Hearst and Jay Gould used their massive wealth to dominate facets of the economy, including the news media. They were, in many […]
Survey: Ohio economists disagree on whether YouTube, Facebook operate as monopolies
Some social-media powerhouses have already come under fire in Ohio. Now a majority of a panel of Ohio economists says three of the biggest — Facebook, YouTube and Twitter — behave as such. But a significant slice of the panel disagreed. The Buckeye State has long played an important role in the history of antitrust […]